Time to move on

The fact is, I’m not unrelaxeddad any more.  Identities evolve, people change, things reach an end and little elf has just driven a pram into my feet.

I’ll be leaving this up and will be letting regulars know where the new location is once I’ve sorted it out.  But it’s time to move on.

Little elves

The last two weekends have been a little difficult, basically in relation to sleeping and child-friendly accommodation (THE MICROWAVE DIDN’T WORK).

Still, there were moments, like dudelet gently leading dudelette in a round of ring-a-ring-of-roses in, of all places, the transept of Winchester’s medieval cathedral.  Given the grim origins of that particular rhyme, it had a certain resonance.  She kept falling down too early but beamed all over her face.  Then dudelet sat down next to supermum and a volunteer host told him how old – seriously old – the bench was that they were sat on.  Whilst she talked (and dudelet put on his shy face) dudelette wriggled in between him and his mother and sat there equally solemnly.

“Gaa!” she said.

She still isn’t talking, by the way, but has developed an extraordinary array of gestures by way of compensating.  She’ll look at you and pat a seat to get you to sit down, smack her lips if she’s hungry, shake and nod her head very firmly indeed and (of course) points at things as fluently as any retired matron in the Provence whilst loudly declaiming in her own incomprehensible language.  In fact, this is very definitely what it must be like to be French, in France and dealing with the English.  Only shrugging has no impact whatsoever – she just carries on pointing.

(And let’s not forget the Little Wagging Finger of Disapproval.)

We’ll pass lightly over the Doormat of Bluebells.

Dudelette is actually a Little Elf. Now I’m aware of the risk I’m running here in referring to a small female toddler as an ‘elf’, little or otherwise, and in charactering dudelet as, well, a bit of a dude.  Oh, yes.  But in continuing to refer to her as ‘dudelette’, I’m running the even more pernicious risk of constructing her as a kind of supplement to her sibling. And she is a little elf.
So dudelette is hereby re-sobriquetted (I don’t care that this isn’t a verb) as the Little Elf. Or as The Little Elf.  I mean, hasn’t Orlando Bloom amended our perception of elves just a little bit?  Elves can be strong, mighty warriors (well, the ones played by any of the actors who weren’t Orlando Bloom, anyway).

And she’s such a little elf. I’ll try out in my next post.

P.S. Dudelet asked what his ‘other willy’ was for.  I’m not ready for that yet.

Here’s something red

Back in a action in a few days – will come visit.

This post goes on and on and really I shouldn’t moan

Openpalm asked a some questions which I’ve often thought about:

about photography– i am so glad to see black and white… and “the moment” captured in the photos i see today on your sidebar. I used to take a lot of photographs, less and less as work and child have changed my schedule (who gets up now at dawn to photograph?) so…my questions to you, what camera do you carry? do you have it with you always? how do you attend to the world and not to the list in your head? another post perhaps?

“How do I attend to the world and not to the list in my head?”  Not very well!

Inasmuch as I define myself as anything, I define myself as a primarily creative kind of person and my primary means of creativity is writing.  I played in bands (generally writing the songs) for years and years.  I took a year out to write a novel which went through the usual number of drafts and rejections (currently being revised again very slowly.  Then dudelet was born.  I didn’t deal very well with a lot of what comes with fatherhood – still don’t – and one of the things that I dealt particularly badly with was the sudden curtailment of the raw quantities of time you need to create.  I started another novel but progress was slow.
[Ironically, writing this has now been interrupted by dudelet who’s insisting - despite the fact that I’ve spent the whole day with him so far - on my coming and playing with him.  He’s spent about ten minutes out in the garden with supermum and has come straight back in.  One problem with dudelet is his lack of any sustained capacity for amusing himself, in sharp contrast to his little sister.  He’s improving but it’s pretty much impossible to do anything in the same room as him, even if he’s watching TV or playing a computer game.]

Where was I?

OK, I was whining.  I also took the opportunity to do another Masters (a career supporting type thing) when my workplace generously offered to pay for it for a part-time MSc in Organizational Behaviour.  That was two and half years ago.  We talked it over and agreed that I could take the degree provided the impact on family life was minimal.  As far as is possible, I kept to that but it also did require a lot of support from supermum (which I tried not to take for granted).  I also suspect that it was around then that I actually began to behalf at least vaguely like a proper parent – most people took three years to do the course and I wanted to do it in two which meant that if I hadn’t  started to take an orderly, attentive view of family life, things would have got very out of hand.

Things got out of hand anyway, despite our best intentions.  At the end of the first term, dudelet broke his leg (posts for December and January 2006 chronicle a lot of this).  I had an essay to finish but six weeks earlier, supermum had had a miscarriage.  Actually, we had had a miscarriage.  She had to go through the physical pain and upset but we both were affected rather more than we’d expected.  One so easily builds little castles in the air.  So I stayed in the hospital for the eleven days dudelet was in traction, taking four hours off each day to go home, grab a shower and try to study.

I think the nights I spent on a fold-out bed next to him were ones that finally knocked me into a vaguely father-shaped kind of thing.  I’m not saying that dudelet and I don’t have a difficult relationship (I am not an easy person to live with) but after that, we had one.

Dudelet was still in a cast (but at home) when my father died.  I didn’t deal with this very well.

So year one of my degree (and I was still holding down my day job) saw a miscarriage, a splintered thigh, a dead parent and a large quantity of blogging.  Then supermum got pregnant again after an unfairly short period of trying.  We agreed that I’d move over to distance learning for the second part of the degree.  That summer (2007) I also bought a digital SLR – taking pictures rapidly became a major creative output for me.  I’ll come back to that.

The second year of my degree was also fairly dramatic, though in a more planned way.  Dudelette arrived in December and illuminated all three of our lives.  We coped by my moving into the lounge whilst supermum co-slept with baby. This meant that she actually got a fair bit of sleep and rest (a second Caesarian is a major operation in anyone’s book) whilst she healed and dudelette got settled in and that I could carry on studying at any hour of the day or night.  I’d get up to help with feeding and nappy duties, log onto the networked learning system and do some work or pull down a few more papers for whichever assignment I was working on.  I actually stayed there till the end of the degree – I don’t think I’d have been able to finish it otherwise – though by September I was starting to get seriously weary of the rather ascetic futon I was sleeping on.  I moved back into our bedroom when dudelette moved out, shortly after my project was delivered.

Since then, dudelette has become a very definite little person, dudelet has become ever more sophisticated and challenging and time has become even more precious.  I think I have about an hour’s spare time during the day, though that involves the two of us not interacting.  My second novel is languishing, interrupted by the degree and with no obvious route to kick-starting it into life again.  I miss it.  I miss writing.  I miss music (I haven’t seriously picked up a guitar since dudelet was born).  I miss the feeling that I’ve produced something that used to provide an identity of some kind, however provisional.

Taking photographs (which I do, like everything, a little too seriously) fills the void a little.  My camera literally goes everywhere with me.  At one level, it’s a practical solution – I have to travel from a to b, I have to go to lunch (most days), I have to progress through life.  I see things and because my camera is there, I take a picture of them.  I try to ensure that the picture means something or (at any rate) has a number of possible ways of being read.  It’s a conscious act and the choices I’ve made in the equipment I use reflect that (within certain financial limitations!).  It also (at the risk of being melodramatic) helps keeps the void at bay.

(And yes, I passed the degree.  I’d accepted that I’d only get a merit given the amount of work that I was able to put in but I really wanted a distinction for the project.  Which I got.  I felt like a fully functional, intelligent, powerful human being for weeks.  I’m aware that this isn’t a healthy attitude!)

To finally get to another part of the question, I have a Pentax 100D – a 6 megapixel camera and an absolutely entry level DSLR.  On the other hand, it’s a Pentax – built like the proverbial brick outhouse and backwards compatible with the old manual lenses from supermum’s film Pentax SLR.  It came with a kit lens – an 18mm to 55mm but the low light performance of that lens is fairly average and there’s visible distortion (well, to me) at the extremes of its zoom.  So I’ve been working with fixed zooms and primes – supermum’s old 135mm (which the crop factor on digital SLR’s renders a 200mm), an old 28mm I picked up that acts as a 50 and a 50mm F2.0 that I recently replaced with an Ebay sourced fully automatic 50mm that stops all the way down to F1.4.  That’s currently my main lens, though I’ll still use the other two.  I keep an eye open for cheap old lenses, though – they’re fun and I like the discipline of having to make all the decisions about focusing, depth of field, exposure and so on.  I also like the fact that old lenses have forced me to really think about what I’m taking, to physically move backwards and forwards to get the angle I want rather than just pressing a button.  I think I’ve learned faster that way.

Usually, I’ll pick a lens for the day and stick with it (almost invariably the FA 50mm at the moment) but if I’m on a family outing, I’ll carry an alternative.

Processing (I use Apple’s Aperture on my MacBook) takes time but I can find half an hour to edit a batch of photos in front of the TV and feel that I’m engaging in a kind of sociability with supermum.  Just not every night.  Mostly, the editing is throwing pictures away!  I don’t have time to cultivate Flickr to much of an extent but I follow people who’s work I like.  I keep a strict line between family snapshots and photos, though I’m very proud of some of the pictures of my children.  But they stay within the family curtainwall, 99% of the time.

I’m not entirely sure what this post is about.  Letting off steam, perhaps?  Tricky.  Forgive the self-indulgence.  Last time anyone asks me a question!!

Dialogues with dudelet

“Is Queen Victoria still alive?”
“No, she died a long time ago.”
“Why do we die?”
“Well, it’s part of nature to die when you get very old.”
“Is that the only way people die?”
“No, sometimes, there are accidents…”
“Why do people have to die apart from getting old?”

==============

(Dudelet at Kennsington Palace, audio guide stuck firmly to his ear.
“Go back to 105 – the music is so beautiful!”
[I obediently dial in the commentary for Room 105.  At that particular moment, in this particular room, he’s right. I think it was the opening fanfare of the Water Music)

==============

“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“What’s a com-mu-ni-ty?”

==============

“Fugger!”
OK, let’s leave this for another post to be entitled “Swearing”.

There are an awful lot of babies out there with no immune systems

Viz don’t touch the baby without washing your hands.

I do not believe in an interventionist God

The comment I added to this picture on Flickr runs:

“It is, of course, the Thames. Strangely, of a walk mostly devoted to taking pictures of a bridge, the only one I like so far has the bridge missing.

I’ve noticed a definite rhythm. I’ll kind of withdraw from Flickr then over a day or two, I’ll start looking at pictures again, browse the last few weeks of my contacts. Then I’ll put one up, mostly because I don’t want to appear lazy or unwilling to be looked at as much as I’m looking (and I’m a pretty critical looker).

Mostly, I’m not sure what to do next. In some ways, it can feel like engaging with Flickr takes me away from the actual business of photography. On the other hand, a photograph with no-one looking at it – or even the threat of someone looking at it – is hardly a picture.”

I haven’t, however, said anything about the title which hopefully speaks for itself.  I do have a problem with the kind of theology which posits God as some kind of almighty security guard, forever patrolling the perimeters of the blessed to keep the enlightened in and the rest of us out.  And that’s where any kind of belief that prayer actually affects the world inevitably ends up – not everyone’s prayers get answered.

Knickers and telling off

Two more things.

Dudelette is fascinated by supermum’s smalls.  She’ll march around with them draped over her shoulders like a shawl, wear them on her head as a hat, pull them around her neck and accessorise with a cowboy hat (wish I’d got a photo of that one) so they look like a kerchief, attempt to put them on her big brother (which he finds hysterical), clean floors with them and, on one occasion, attempted to give them to a very uninterested cat.

She wags her finger.  If someone in the house is being told off, she’ll race to the scene of the action and stand there delivering a stern lecture (“BAH ba ma ma ba ba BA!”) whilst solemnly wagging the Tiny Finger of Disapproval.  She did this earlier on and seriously got on dudelet’s nerves (“She’s telling me off as well! Stop her!”) whilst supermum and I tried to suppress a fit of the giggles next door.

Keys and other quick developmental notes

A five minute post. This isn’t going to be riveting unless you’re me in about five years.

Dudelete is now one and a quarter. Her fascination with keys continues.  She’s currently trotting around the house with a bunch of keys ‘locking’ every day she comes to.  She still doesn’t have more than four or five discernable words but babbles conversationally with a wide range of syllables and vowel sounds.  When she concentratedly focuses on communicating something, though, she still sticks to ‘maaa’ and ‘mumumu’ and ‘na-a-a-a’ and a lot of gesturing.

As yet, no real favourite cuddly toys (unless you count keys) though she adores her little yellow pram.

She’s attempting to dress herself (shoes and socks) and is starting to get a little bit fussy about what she will and won’t wear. She also tries to dress other people.

We’ve experienced her first lying-on-the-floor tantrums, though in comparison to dudelet’s they’re positively cute.

And now it’s time to rush her (and dudelet) to the childminders prior to haring (sp?) off to work.

Gerhard Richter and dudelette and the National Portrait Gallery.

Dudelette and I went to see the new Gerhard Richter – Portraits retrospective at the National Portait Gallery.  (Note to Londonders or visitors – if you’re with a pram, exit Charing Cross via the escalator up to the mainline station.  Or there’s an awful lot of steps to negotiate.  On the way back?  Well, there are a lot of steps.  London Underground is a grim prospect for people in wheelchairs or with young children.)  Foer the record, the exhibition is intriguing but keeps you at arm’s length.  Richter’s work is all about the impenetrable nature of the individual, how the subject will always be re-read and re-appropriated in different ways by the viewer and the signature blurs and varieties of veil that mark his paintings are techniques of alienation that make his work easy to admire but hard to love.  There are exceptions though – some of the more personal pictures, of family members or friends, have a kind of poignant edge to them that one might ascribe to a keener sense on the part of the artist of the consequences of the on-going failure to bridge the particular kind of gap that his pictures document.

Dudelette had no particular interest in the portraits themselves but definitely wanted to get out of her buggy and explore the gallery space.  So I snapped her into her reins and off we went.  Now reins were something that never worked for dudelet – he’d suffer us to put them on but utterly refused to travel in whichever direction we needed to go.  Or I or supermum needed to go.  His endgame would always be to simply lie down and refuse to move and people look at you in a funny way if you’re dragging a prone toddler down the street.  Dudelette vaguely cooperates but steering her with one hand and the pram with the other gets complicated, especially with the amount of old people you generally find in the NPG for whom a randomly starting and stopping little person travelling at knee-height at represents a bit of a traffic hazard.

Still, she spent a while contemplating ‘Speigel’ which was just close enough to the ground for her to make out the top of her head and she also found the cabling which ran around the rooms at (for her) chest height fascinating in a grab-and-shake sort of way.  We also didn’t encounter any grumpy gallery attendants (we even met one friendly one) which is always a bonus.  The NPG, though, just isn’t set up for children.  There aren’t any specific activities for little ones (unlike the Tate Modern) and the cafe is just the wrong shape – a long, narrow corridor furnished with two rows of two person tables.  There was one Trip-Trap chair but the design of the tables meant that you couldn’t actual push it close enough for dudelette to comfortably reach the table top.  It also meant that anything she dropped would go straight down to the floor.  The scone I had was dry at the edges (yesterday’s?) and she really didn’t like the choclate chip cookie I bought her.

Overall, though, I got to see the paintings in enough detail to form an opinion (result!), dudelette had a substantial run around in a new environment and we got back in time for lunch together with supermum and dudelet.  Perhaps I’ll take her to the new Photographers’ Gallery next time – the old one had a great cafe.